Correct History

SAHARASIA:

The 4000 BCE Origins of Child Abuse,
Sex-Repression, Warfare and
Social Violence

by James DeMeo

New Study On the Origins of Violence Proves:
Ancient Humans Were Peaceful, Modern Violence is Avoidable.

A new geographical study on the ancient historical origins of human
violence and warfare, drawing upon global archaeological and
anthropological evidence, has just been published presenting substantial
proof that our ancient ancestors were non-violent, and far more social and
loving than are most humans today - moreover, the study points to a
dramatic climate change in the Old World, the drying up of the vast Sahara
and Asian Deserts, with attending famine, starvation and forced migrations
which pushed the earliest humans into violent social patterns, a trauma
from which we have not yet recovered in over 6000 years.

The study and book, titled SAHARASIA: The 4000 BCE Origins of Child Abuse,
Sex-Repression, Warfare and Social Violence, In the Deserts of the Old
World, by retired professor James DeMeo, Ph.D., is the culmination of years
of library and field research on the subject. Professor DeMeo undertook
the original research as a 7-year dissertation project at the University of
Kansas, which was concluded in 1986. He has since put an additional decade
of research into the subject. His study is unusual in that it presents the
first world maps of human behavior, as developed from large
anthropological, historical and archaeological data bases. DeMeo's
findings were also recently presented at a regional meeting of the AAAS, in
Grand Junction, Colorado.

"There is no clear or unambiguous evidence for warfare or social violence
anywhere on planet Earth prior to around 4,000 BC and the earliest evidence
appears in specific locations, from which it firstly arose, and diffused
outward over time to infect nearly every corner of the globe." says DeMeo,
who today directs his own private institute in rural Oregon. "A massive
climate change shook the ancient world, when approximately 6000 years ago
vast areas of lush grassland and forest in the Old World began to quickly
dry out and convert into harsh desert. The vast Sahara Desert, Arabian
Desert, and the giant deserts of the Middle East and Central Asia simply
did not exist prior to c.4000 BC" DeMeo asserts, pointing to numerous
studies in paleoclimatology - the study of ancient climates. "Something
happened around 4000 BC which forced the drying-out of this vast desert
region, which I call Saharasia, and the drier conditions created social and
emotional havoc among developing human agricultural societies in these same
regions."

DeMeo's maps show spreading centers for the origins of patriarchal
authoritarian cultures within this same Saharasian global region -
male-dominated, child-abusive, sex-repressive cultures with a great
emphasis upon war-making and empire-building. DeMeo points to the work of
the controversial natural scientist Wilhelm Reich to explain the patterns.

"Famine and starvation is a severe trauma from which survivors rarely
escape unscathed. A lot of people die, families are split apart, and
babies and children are often abandoned, and suffer enormously. Starvation
affects surviving children in an emotionally severe manner. They shrink
from the exhausting heat and thirst, emotionally withdraw from the painful
world, and simultaneously suffer a severe stunting of the entire brain and
nervous system due to protein-calorie malnutrition. Even if such starved
children later get all the food and water they want, they are deeply
scarred in an emotional-neurological manner which forever changes their
behavior - specifically, there is an implanted inhibition of any impulse of
a pleasure-seeking, outward-reaching nature, and a discomfort with deeper
forms of body-pleasure, in both maternal-infant or male-female expressions.
Additionally, the child's view of the mother, who could not protect or feed
the child during the famine period, is thereafter colored with suspicion
and anger. These attitudes and behaviors are deeply protoplasmic in
nature, and are passed on to ensuing generations no matter what the
climate, by social institutions which reflect the character structure of
the average individual at any given period of time."

As part of his project, DeMeo undertook a cross-cultural evaluation of
Wilhelm Reich's original ideas on human behavior. "Reich claimed humans
became violent from two major causes: firstly from abusive and neglectful
treatment of infants and children, and secondly from the repression of
adolescent heterosexual feelings." This latter consideration, DeMeo
asserts, has gotten nearly no attention from specialists on child-abuse,
given that our society still considers adolescent romance and pre-marital
sex to be a bad thing. "Pre-marital, adolescent sexual romance is normal
among the most peaceful cultures, but is always repressed in violent
warlike cultures. It is an even more precise predictor of social and
individual violence than is child-abuse." Ideas such as these got Reich
into hot water in the 1950s, DeMeo says, and his own work has similarly
stirred up controversy.

To test Reich's ideas, DeMeo reviewed social variables on child-rearing,
sexuality, the status of women, and violence, for over 1000 aboriginal
cultures from around the world. "The cross-cultural evidence is very clear
about this: the most violent human societies are those which treat their
children in a neglectful and punitive manner, and which also demand sexual
abstinence from their young unmarried people. Such cultures also emphasize
highly compulsive forms of marriage, with a reduced status for women, and a
lot of strong-man political or religious bosses who order everyone around
at the point of a spear."

DeMeo does not pull punches about our own society. "Americans are not as
violent as the most extremely violent cultures around the world, but we
certainly are not as peaceful as the most peaceful societies.
Unfortunately, our culture appears to be going towards increased social
violence." He points to the general failure of parents and sex-education
programs to say much of anything positive about sexual pleasure, with the
great emphasis upon "abstinence education", as a major cause for the
growing violence in our schools. "Our young people should be warmly
romancing each other, dancing and singing together, making love and
enjoying what should be the happiest time of their lives. Instead, we
start our children off with a lot of hidden cruelty in the hospital birth,
with incubator-isolation, denial of the mother's breast, time-table feedings,
circumcision and so forth.

Later, it is compulsory schooling,
obedience-training and so-called 'tough love'. Then comes the biggest lie,
the 'sex-can-kill' hypothesis stemming from modern AIDS hysteria, a disease
for which young adolescents and teens have virtually a zero risk." DeMeo
injects an additional controversy into his work, by siding with dissenting
scientists who reject the "infectious-HIV" hypothesis of AIDS, and he
points to various studies supporting this criticism (such as those by Prof.
Peter Duesberg, the retrovirus specialist at the University of California
at Berkeley, and by the larger "Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the
HIV Hypothesis of AIDS").

"We give potent and dangerous psycho-drugs like Ritalin to perhaps 10% of
the livelier kids, which is a major scandal in this country, to squash them
into conformity with our obedience-demanding school system, or to the
irrational demands of their families. Then we give them inaccurate and
superstitious lies about the supposed dangerousness of love-making, and
unrealistically expect them to behave in a loving and calm manner. We
still define a 'good child' as the one who is quiet and obedient, who does
not have any sexual expression - but our entire society is constructed like
a social pressure cooker in which an enormous inner tension has built up.
Social violence, suicide and drug abuse erupts from that high-pressure
situation, in a very predictable manner."

The roots of modern violence are
similar to the ancient roots of violence, DeMeo says: "It is all in the
treatment of our children, and in our sexual attitudes and behavior. If we
would end institutional violence towards babies and children in the
hospitals, making gentle home birth more widely available,
ending practices such as circumcision, allowing more freedom and even
student-democracy in the schools, emphasizing 'hearts over heads', if we
could be more tolerant of adolescent romance and premarital sex - giving
kids a real education about contraceptives and love instead of a false
education of AIDS hysteria - and also eliminate compulsiveness in our
marriages, then social violence would gradually ebb away. Ending the
better-known forms of child-abuse, such as beating of children, is very
important but by itself is simply insufficient."

DeMeo again points to the cross-cultural evidence to support his, and
Reich's, controversial positions. "If this theory was wrong, there would
have been no positive support from the cross-cultural evidence, and no
patterns on my world maps. Instead, the cross-cultural review demonstrated
a 95% positive correlation between the many variables, at a high level of
statistical significance." DeMeo's "World Behavior Map" which was also
prepared from cross-cultural data, appears strikingly similar to a world
climate map, with the harshest desert areas of the Old World characterized
by extreme patriarchal authoritarian culture.

The geographical patterns,
he asserts, are imbedded in the same data found in every university
library. "These data were gathered by hundreds of anthropologists who
engaged in field work and published their studies over the last 100 years.
The data was then coded by a team under the direction of George Peter
Murdock at the University of Pittsburgh in the 1960s. I took the data and
made maps from them, and the maps demonstrated the Saharasian patterns
which can be clearly seen. This finding has therefore been subjected to a
triple-blind control procedure, which virtually insures the pattern is real
and not some methodological quirk or accident. My later review of
archaeological and historical patterns demonstrated the same Saharasian
pattern extended back in time to around 4000 BC, which was the starting
point for both the vast Saharasian desert belt, and the very first
child-abusive, sex-repressive, and violent patriarchal authoritarian
societies. The drying up of the Saharasian desert belt was the cause of a
vast epoch of generations-long famine, migration and land-abandonment,
leading to the first-time appearance of warlike patriarchal authoritarian
culture. The process started firstly in Arabia and Central Asia, spreading
outwards over several thousand years to eventually encompass nearly the
entire world."

DeMeo believes his findings provide conclusive proof for other social
theorists who have long argued for peaceful social conditions among the
earliest humans. "The 'Garden of Eden' myths, which exist in the
historical literature of many Old World cultures, appear to be factually
rooted in this early period of socially-cooperative and peaceful social
conditions, when the Saharasia was green and fruitful. Then came the
devastating climate change towards aridity, which formed the vast
Saharasian desert belt, and humans were literally cast 'out of the garden'.
The rest is history."

More about the book SAHARASIA:
The 4000 BCE Origins of Child Abuse, Sex-Repression, Warfare
and Social Violence, In the Deserts of the Old World

by James DeMeo

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